We wanted to revisit Dutch illustrator Piet Marée, whose style is so unusual it's very much worth another look. There's nothing biographical out there about him, as far as we can find. But we love his work. Een boodschap aan Garcia, which means, “a message to Garcia,” was written by Luc Willink, aka Lucas Willink, aka Clifford Semper, and published by Hague based Anker-Boekenclubin in 1950. How it relates to Elbert Hubbard's dramatized 1916 essay of the same name (which resulted in a 1936 Barbara Stanwyck movie) is unknown to us. We can tell you it's the same story—U.S. soldier Andrew S. Rowan carries a secret message from President William McKinley to Calixto García, a rebel hiding in the mountains of Cuba, before the Spanish American War. But the point here is Marée's art. We love it. We'll try to dig up more from him to share later. 

We have another paperback collection for you today, and this one is a no-brainer for a pulp site. There are hundreds of covers featuring women in bars, many of which we've already shared, such as here, here (scroll down), and here. Above and below are more, and as soon as we uploaded them we went to do exactly what the art depicts. Have a happy Friday, everyone.

Does this image of Karin Dor look familiar? Possibly because it’s the same one we used in a femme fatale post on her late last year. It was made to promote the film You Only Live Twice, and appeared in many places, here for example on the cover of the French magazine Cinémonde. Focusing pretty much exclusively on movies and movie stars, Cinémonde launched in 1928 and lasted until 1971, with seven years of dormancy from 1940 to 1946, and another two in 1969 and 1970. The examples you see here are all from the mid- to late-1960s, when director Maurice Bessy moved toward less conservative graphics than in the past. Generally Cinémonde cover stars were women, often French, but every once in a while a guy made the cut, such as the fronts with Marlon Brando and Gérard Philipe below. We’ll get to the interiors of Cinémonde a bit later.

After two weeks of unknowns, we’re back to a face we recognize on this installment of the Good Time Weekly Calendar of 1963. She’s none other than Diane Webber, aka Marguerite Empey, one of the most popular nudist models of the 1960s, photographed by Peter Chiodo. We say “nudist” rather than nude because she specialized in posing for sun worshipper publications, of which we posted a rather entertaining collection here way back in 2008. Below are the usual transcriptions of daily quips from the calendar. And like always, some of them are nonsensical to us. For instance, did people really call women "turnpikes" back then? And what the hell is Jackie Gleason on about? No idea. But we’ll keep sharing these little quotations anyway on the off chance you get a chuckle out of them.

March 31: “Man to man: Planting gardens is strictly for the birds.”—He-who Who-he

April 1: “April Fool. Our favorite Biblical truth for today is: Do one to others as others do one to you.”—Art Linkletter

April 2: Tranquilizers in April are sold to help decide the line between straight income or capital gain.

April 3: Women’s hair rinse: Wash-and-wear.

April 4: “Don’t call any woman a turnpike unless it’s absolutely true—not a curve in sight.”—He-who Who-he

April 5: “Remember the good old days? The ‘cold war’ was only a fight between you and the janitor.”—Jackie Gleason

April 6: The twist is not possible in Russia because too much is already twisted there. 

The National Police Gazette focuses on sports with this July 1956 cover of welterweight and middleweight boxing champion Carmen Basilio. According to the Gazette, Basilio lost his welterwight title to challenger Johnny Saxton due to the fact that the judges had been bought off by local mob figures. This may have been true. Saxton was tight with—or perhaps controlled by—a Philadelphia wiseguy named Blinky Palermo. Saxton was no hack—he went 39-0-1 to start his career—but in some of those fights his opponents gave less than their all, conspicuously so.

Saxton won his first title in 1954 against Kid Gavilán, and that fight was openly discussed as a fixed affair. When Saxton topped Basilio in March 1956 in a fifteen round decision, Basilio said bluntly of the judging, “It was like being robbed in a dark alley.” The Gazette took up his case four months later. Other magazines weighed in on Basilio’s behalf as well, and in September 1956 he got his revenge when he knocked out Saxton in a rematch.

Basilio finished his career with a respectable record of 56-27-7, having taken quite a few beatings, but also having dished quite a few out. In the end his face was a topographical map of all those battles, with ridges and hillocks everywhere, but on this Gazette cover showing him after winning the welterweight title, he positively glows. There’s nothing quite like winning.